Late August evenings

Posted on 24th August 2020 by Ian

It is a grey evening. Somerset’s cricket match today was disrupted by persistent breaks for rain and bad light.

In childhood, the closing days of the summer holidays were a harbinger of doom, it announced the imminent onset of a new school year. Perhaps it was also the time when the return of the darkness became apparent. Perhaps the greyness became more intense.

A vivid memory remains of an aunt standing in the low-ceilinged kitchen of my grandparents’ farmhouse. My aunt and uncle and their family would come to stay each summer, my uncle assisting with the harvest. My aunt stared out into the evening gloom and said, “Eight o’clock and it’s getting dark already”.

Of course the days had been getting shorter since the solstice, but it hadn’t seemed to notice. A couple of minutes each day hardly register when you were outside every evening. When the couple of minutes had accumulated into a couple of hours, the realisation came that summer was really past.

In memory, it is the darkness that remains as frightening. Darkness meant real darkness; there was not a single streetlight in the village, and apart from the lights from the windows of the scattered houses, there was a sense of overwhelming isolation. Once darkness fell, people went indoors, closing out the world of wind and rain. The outside world continued to exist only through the flickering black and white images on the television.

Years later, trying to articulate those childhood fears caused bafflement to the listener. “Surely the autumn and winter were cosy times when you could sit inside by the fire?”

“No, they weren’t. Sometimes I had to watch the news on the television, even if I didn’t understand it, to break the sense of isolation; to make the day seem real”.

“But how did that help?”

“It just did. It meant that the world and life was carrying on”.

Little things became sources of encouragement. A BBC piece about the springtime in New Zealand brought a feeling that while we headed into the cold darkness, there were people for whom the light was returning.

When I lived in Ireland, it was easy to understand how the Celtic people became so attached to the light and how they counted their seasons differently.While England still counts these days as summer, we are approaching the end of the first month of autumn in the Celtic calendar.

Walking out of a brightly-lit supermarket out on a grey, evening, the loss of the light still has the capacity to stir long off memories.

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Taking you on holiday is better than fixing your gas meter

Posted on 23rd August 2020 by Ian

The gas meter was not working. “Uncle Pat could help you,” my mother suggested. He probably would, were it not for the fact that it is fifteen or twenty years since he retired.

Uncle Pat started out as a gas fitter and worked his way up to a management position, but it is not for his work that I most remember him, it is for the fact that he and my Auntie Pearl took me for my first holiday.

It was August 1968.  My aunt is only twelve years older than me, so was nineteen at the time, but she was my aunt and was always grown up.

We left Yeovil in Somerset on a Saturday morning in my uncle’s little blue Simca to travel to Perranporth on the north coast of Cornwall. The journey was maybe a hundred and twenty miles, but there was no motorway and the entire population of the country seemed to be heading westwards.

All went well until we were crossing Bodmin Moor in a constant line of traffic. The heavily laden car broke down. My uncle was always very organized and an AA patrolman on a bright yellow motorcycle came along and fixed it, though the delay seemed almost unendurable for a small boy.

We reached the campsite by teatime, to join another uncle and aunt and five of my cousins. Unpacking the car brought laughter: the Simca was rear engined and my other uncle, mug of tea in hand, walked over to look into the boot at the front of the car, where all the bags were stowed, “Pat,” he called,”it’s no wonder you broke down. The car has no bloody engine in it!”

The sun shone brilliantly the next day and we descended the cliffs to the huge sandy beach with the Atlantic waves bringing brilliant white surf. Rowntree’s Fruit Gums from a yellow box were passed around. Monday came damp and misty and there was no chance of the beach; we went to Penzance and sat in the car and ate Cornish pasties looking out at the rain. By Tuesday, the sunshine had returned, the sky was vivid blue and the whole day was spent doing whatever a seven year old did for a day on the beach.

My next memory was Wednesday morning, the wind had blown down our tent and heavy rain was falling. I had continued sleeping, even with no tent over me. We packed and headed for home.

Pat and Pearl have remained happily remembered ever since.

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Envying an innings

Posted on 22nd August 2020 by Ian

Siegfried Sassoon was an extraordinary character. A soldier whose reckless regard for his own safety and his sacrificial concern for his men earned him the nickname “Mad Jack,” he was awarded the Military Cross for bringing back the wounded in one action, and would have received the Distinguished Service Order for his bravery in another action, if the overall action itself had not been adjudged to have been a failure. Serving on the Western Front and Palestine, Captain Sassoon was once shot through the torso by enemy fire and once suffered a bullet wound to the head from a rifle fired from his own lines, both wounds requiring his return to hospitals in England.  A war hero, a major poet and memoirist, a renowned anti-war campaigner, he was also known as an enthusiastic huntsman, a skilled horseman, a good golfer, and a handy cricketer.

Of all the qualities of Siegfried Sassoon that I envy, it is his proficiency at the cricket crease that I most admire.

It was cricket played at local club level, but such cricket seems to capture the essence of the game. When Sassoon describes turning out for local teams and batting in the middle of the order and scoring a respectable thirty or forty runs, I wish that I could have had that degree of hand-eye co-ordination and that degree of athleticism.

Cricket grounds were more plentiful in his times, the sport more widely played. There would hardly have been a village that did not field at least one team. Quantity did not mean quality when it came to playing conditions. Pitches were much more primitive, the bounce of the ball was much more uneven, the equipment much more a random collection of what could be gathered up.

Yet no matter how haphazard the game, no matter how basic the amenities, there is an aesthetic quality about cricket. Pitches are immaculate, the square at the centre is as smooth as baize. Pavilions are often quaint, sometimes pretty, always homely. The game is not merely competitive sport, it is an experience and a culture. Stand at the gateway of a village cricket ground and you are standing at the entrance to a world of tradition, skill, friendship and beauty.

In the 1990s, in times when I still bought a hard copy newspaper, I remember that I bought the Daily Telegraph for no reason other than its cricket writing.  Siegfried Sassoon would have made an unmatched cricket correspondent.

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Following the plough

Posted on 21st August 2020 by Ian

My cousin’s son is the image of our grandfather, so much so that I posted pictures on Instagram: one of my grandfather on his wedding day in 1935 and one of his great grandson eighty-five years later. The family genes are very strong, the shape of the nose, the eyes, the hairline, the enigmatic smile.

Perhaps genes are manifest in terms of personality as well as physical features. Perhaps there are genetic messages that pass on personal likes and preferences and choices of lifestyle.

Farming was not just about what my grandfather did, it defined who he was. Farming shaped every hour of every day. There was no question of clocking off and going home for the day, at any time on any day there could be urgent matters to which to attend. Farming determined who were his friends, for the only people he saw were those who gathered at the market, or those who gathered at the farm to lend a hand at busy times. Farming governed spending decisions, education choices, plans for the future.

Eighty-five years between the photographs and the great grandson continues the family tradition of living the farming life. He posted a picture this week of ploughing a field of stubble, a flock of gulls followed the tractor. There was something timeless about the scene.

Of course, in 1935, my grandfather took considerably longer to plough a field than it would take now. With the horse that did the heavy work on the farm in those days before the tractor, he might have completed a single acre in a hard day’s work. In 2020, the tractor pictured can plough four or five acres an hour.

Despite the differences in the amount of land that might have been ploughed, there is a continuity in the life.

The farmers of my grandfather’s generation would have been familiar with the flatlands of the Somerset Levels and the challenges they could pose for farmers. They would have known flooding more regular and more extensive than is the case in most winters now. The twenty-one pumping stations now dotted across the heartlands of Somerset were an innovation that was only beginning to appear. They would have known the heartbreak, and potential financial calamity, brought by the death of livestock, or the loss of a crop to bad weather. They would have known the difficulty of balancing the books, the headaches of making a right decision

Farming might be more business-like, more technological, greatly more mechanized, but the challenges have not gone away. There must be a gene that helps people cope with such a life.

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Miss Everitt’s ecology lessons

Posted on 20th August 2020 by Ian

Generations of pupils at High Ham Primary School will remember Miss Everitt, the infant teacher who for decades taught the infant class at our two teacher school.

Progress in our school was simple, you went in the front door each morning. For the first half of the time you spent at the school, you turned right and went into the infant room. For the second half of your primary education, you turned left to go into the junior room, where you would be taught by Miss Rabbage, our headmistress.

However, whether you turned right or you turned left, the person who taught you “nature” lessons was Miss Everitt. In infant class, nature was an integral part of our daily education. In junior class, one afternoon a week, we crossed the corridor while the infants came into our room to allow us to spend the afternoon learning about nature.

There was no national curriculum fifty years ago, prescribing what should be taught to who at which age. Presumably, teachers had a syllabus they followed, a scheme of learning for each year, but there must have been a considerable degree of flexibility.

I remember history lessons on the ancient Sumerian civilisation and eminent Victorians and war heroes. I remember Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies in English along with 1960s reading books. I remember art lessons drawing the Queen’s Beasts and other art lessons in which we drew the art teacher’s pigeons (he came every Wednesday afternoon and actually brought into school the pigeons he took to local shows). But the lessons I most remember are the nature lessons.

Perhaps the lessons were part of a syllabus followed by every school and are remembered because they were different from much of 1960s education, which was, for the most part, very dry and very academic.  Perhaps the lessons are remembered because they were part of the education throughout the time at the school. Perhaps the lessons are remembered because they were about the world around us.

Miss Everitt tried to fill us with a sense of wonder at the things we might otherwise have hardly noticed. Our lessons looked at the flora and fauna to be found in our own village. We were asked to bring in flowers, to draw them and to label each part of our drawings. Miss Everitt taught us about the seasons and about the changes for which we should watch as the year passed,

Miss Everitt was conservative and old-fashioned and would have recoiled at the idea of being labelled as in any way radical, but her lessons taught us an appreciation of our environment long before particular groups sought to appropriate the label “green” to themselves.

 

 

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